Grabbing The High Ground

Back in the old days before the French Revolution the world was a conservative place. Rigidly conservative.

And the reason was pretty simple.  In the agricultural age if you made a mistake out on the farm it was curtains.  The only thing to do was to stick with what worked: tradition.

But since the Enlightenment tradition has been on the defensive.  In fact even gradual reform has been on the defensive.  Human rights and reason have carried all before them. 

In the old days, the reformer had to prove his point; now the traditionalist had to show cause why mindless tradition should be preferred over rational reform.  And never mind what Edmund Burke said in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

That’s a big deal, as Ben Shapiro writes.

In the realm of politics, the question of burden of proof is a vital one. Whoever has the burden of proof is at a disadvantage.

The issue of gay marriage illustrates this.  Reverend Reggie Longcrier asked the Democratic presidential candidates this week:

[W]hy is it still acceptable to use religion to deny gay Americans their full and equal rights?

When you put it that way—and the MSM usually does—you put yourself in the driver’s seat, forcing the opponents of gay marriage to show cause why we should not implement gay marriage immediately.

For the argument against gay marriage is usually an argument from tradition.  That’s the way it’s always been and we don’t know what could happen if we change things.

Actually, in the area of gay marriage we do have rational knowledge.  We know that children need to live with their married mother and father if they are to be safest.  And we know that the “sexual constitution” by which men are socialized from their natural predatory instinct to be faithful fathers and providers is harmed by promotion of “diverse” lifestyles.

We know that where the family is concerned the burden of proof ought to be on the people who want change.

But still.  As of right now the burden of proof is on the traditionalists.  On almost everything.

And that has to change.

British Conservatives in a Pickle

In Britain they are trying to dry out after 50 year floods.  But in the Conservative media they are drowning from the incompetence of Conservative leader David Cameron.  At least that’s what ASimon Heffer thinks. 

The leader of the Labour Party, he writes, has shown himself to be a “serious politician.”

The Leader of the Opposition, by contrast, has no programme other than a concatenation of stunts... He finds the traditional beliefs, and the traditional believers, of his party utterly detestable.

Not surprising, when you consider that his only proper job before entering politics was in PR.

Here in the US Cal Thomas has written off not just the British Conservative Party but the whole United Kingdom.  Reviewing the Conservative Party policy document on welfare reform, “Breakdown Britain” and the hostility of the British courts to religion he expects things to get worse, not better.

Britain is broken. The cause runs deeper than the Tories can address, even if they win the next election, which seems unlikely.

In the present political season Republicans in the US are not feeling too good.  The Iraq War is a mess and Democrats are raising a lot more money to fund the 2008 presidential election. But a look at Britain tells us just how good we have it.

The reason that David Cameron is struggling is that he is leading a center right party in a country with two center left parties.  He is in the same position as US liberals.  Living in a conservative country they have to pretend that they are patriotic and respectful of religion and traditional values to get elected.

But everyone knows that liberals think that patriotism is really nascent fascism, and God is a delusion.

In Britain the Conservatives have to pretend that they are really centrists, that they really love government schools and government health care.   When everyone knows they do not.

The Secret Life of Cars

You may not have wondered how a car makes you feel, but BMW has.  That’s what Richard Morrison found out.  Says the “driver interfaces psychologist” at BMW:

We’re constantly asking the question: what kind of psychological space is a car?

Well, of course, we’ve all wondered that.  And we’ve wondered how many people call their car by a nickname (26 percent of women), the importance of cup-holders (they make you feel safe).  And you’ve wondered how many people sing in the car (four times as many during the morning rush hour as the evening rush hour).  It’s all there in BMW’s Secret Life of Cars.

But the big question is why people drive their cars rather than take public transportation.  The answer is perfectly simple.

Time and again, car owners identified the “cocoon-like security” of the car — the enjoyment of personal space, the chance it gives for “me time” — as the reason why they prefer to drive, even where public transport is cheaper and more convenient[.]

But you knew that.

Democrats' New War on Poverty

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards both want to declare a new war on poverty, writes Linda Chavez.

Mr. Obama wants to tie the minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index, which would price the lowest-skilled workers, especially young blacks, out of the job market, not to mention increase inflationary pressure on wages.

Mr. Edwards would have the government create 1 million new temporary jobs for the chronically unemployed, despite abundant research that shows these programs have no lasting impact in reducing poverty or increasing long-term employment among the poor.

Oh dear.  All this stuff has been shown to be nonsense time and time again, most notably by Charles Murray in Losing Ground.

So why don’t Democrats propose something that might actually work?

The elephant in the room, of course is family breakdown.  As Chavez relates:

Poverty rates for families headed by a single white woman with children under 18 were 25.3 percent in 2005; for similarly constituted black families, the rate was a shocking 42 percent. But for married couple families, the comparable rate for whites was just 6.1 percent, and for black families only 8.3 percent.

This really isn’t rocket science.  Government welfare benefits encourage family breakup and broken-up families reduced to the mammalian minimum of mother and child are much poorer than mother-father-children families.

Chavez writes that Democrats worry about not being “inclusive” or of being “intolerant” if they “talk up marriage.”

I wonder about that. 

The problem for Democrats goes deeper than inclusiveness and intolerance.  It’s not airy-fairy notions that hold them back from reforming the welfare state.  It is political survival.

Democrats’ whole political support system is built upon patronage and clientage, playing Lady Bountiful and distributing benefits to the tenants on the liberal plantation.  People that have risen out of poverty through work and family find that they don’t need government.  That’s when they stop voting Democrat.  And that’s when all the Democratic government employees find themselves out of a job.

And Democrats know it. 

The "New Victorians:" a Trend or a "Trend?"

It would all seem pretty sensible if it weren’t that the trendy New York Observer’s Lizzy Ratner was all over it.  According to  Suzanne Fields the new generation of twentysomethings are getting married earlier and having children.

Websites for "modest clothing" are expanding, and Wendy Shalit, who earlier wrote about "A Return to Modesty," has a new book called "Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good."

And in a telling comment, the daughter of sex goddess Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) illuminates the other side of the sexual revolution.

"When you’re 12," says Molly Jong Fast, "there’s nothing funny about your mother’s fourth wedding."

Erica Jong had books to sell so she had an excuse.  But the rest of womankind doesn’t do well with open marriages and a “sexual life.”  Women don’t do too well with abortions and empty cradles.  But a lot more women are going to have to be hurt before we change the culture to make it more friendly to families and mothers and children.

But is this really a trend?  Or just media hype?

Dean Barnett's 9/11 Generation

We know all about the Boomer generation, says 40-ish Dean Barnett.  Forty years ago, they (that is, we, since I’m a boomer) checked out of their generational challenge. 

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers—those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation—took the opposite path from their parents during World War II.

But now we have the 9/11 generation.  And it is starting to look as if it is very different.  Barnett has been taking a look at the young people signing up for the armed forces and he likes what he sees.

Some of these men have Ivy League degrees; all of them are talented and intelligent individuals who... could have chosen to do anything with their lives.

Something about the culture has changed.  Barnett speaks about a young man who graduated recently from Harvard and obtained a commission in the United States Marine Corps.

After his commissioning, this freshly minted United States Marine returned to his Harvard dorm room to clean it out.

As he entered the dorm in his full dress uniform, some of his classmates gave him a spontaneous round of applause. A campus police officer took him aside to shake his hand. His father observed, "It was like something out of a movie."

So what is it about these young men? LTC Kurt Schlichter of the California National Guard has an answer:

"The direction comes from themselves. They like to be challenged."

Here’s another idea.  After the cultural revolution of the last half century young men have discovered that they have a real problem in choosing and living a life that has meaning.  Men have been marginalized and scapegoated out of their respected roles and fathers and providers and they have been forbidden to complain.

But what young men can do is what they have always been able to do.  They can offer themselves and their lives in the defense of the nation’s women and children.

Things haven’t changed that much after all.

What Do Women Want?

The feminists don’t want to hear it, according to Megan Basham, but married women are trickling out of the workforce.  And it’s because they don’t want to work full-time. 

Only 21 percent of working mothers report a preference for a 40+-hour work week, while only 16 percent of at-home moms say the same.

What could be driving this?  Feminists say it’s the post 9/11 economy.

Rather than admit the obvious, that women increasingly favor cutting back their careers when their children are young, some feminists are employing their own brand of voodoo economics. Women aren’t opting out, they’re being pushed out, they say.

There is this idea out there that working for a living, having a brilliant career, is the reason for living. Sorry to rain on the parade but it ain’t so.

Men work mainly so that they can get access to women.  Down the ages, women have preferred monogamy, and they have preferred men that didn’t look like losers—in short, men with jobs.  So men figure that they’d better get a job.

High status women, the ones that men fight over, are a different proposition.  Men with a taste for them need more than a job; they need a fortune, or a fortunate political career.

Women work because... Yes why do women go out to work?  Many women work because they have to.  Always have, always will.  But we are talking about the upper-class feminist ladies, women like the First Feminist Simone de Beauvoir and Second Feminist Betty Friedan.  What they wanted was liberation, liberation from the fundamental work of women, which is, of course the only really important work in the world, the work of generation. 

But a generation after the intoxication of the Second Wave of feminism many women are finding that the most important thing in their lives is children—their children.  So they are asking themselves why they are out in the world working themselves to exhaustion when all they can think about is their children.

It’s a good point.